Grand societal challenges, such as global warming, can only be adequately dealt with through wide-ranging changes in technology, production and consumption, and ways of life, that is, through innovation. Furthermore, change will involve a variety of sectors or parts of the economy and society, and these change processes must be sufficiently consistent in order to achieve the desired results. This poses huge challenges for policy-making. This paper focus on implications for the governance of innovation policy, i.e., policies influencing a country’s innovation performance.
The privatization of agricultural research and extension establishments worldwide has led to the development of a market for services designed to support agricultural innovation. However, due to market and systemic failures, both supply side and demand side parties in this market have experienced constraints in effecting transactions and establishing the necessary relationships to engage in demand-driven innovation processes.
This paper describes the research path followed by a team of researchers who had investigated the nitrate problem in a case study area, and who became aware of the low impact of their data on the policy debate and on the practices that – as the research team saw it – had given rise to the problem in the first place. They embarked on a series of interactions first with participatory action researchers from the SLIM project (see Fig.
The transition to a market for agricultural research and knowledge-intensive services presents various challenges for actors in the agricultural knowledge infrastructure, on both the demand side (end users of innovations such as farmers, and the government) and the supply side (providers of research and knowledge-intensive services). New organizational arrangements try to bring together supply and demand in the agricultural knowledge infrastructure. This thesis is about such new organizational arrangements
Although innovation is understood to encompass much more than R&D, science continues to be an essential ingredient. In particular translation, adaptation and ‘valorisation’ of research results, the responsiveness of research to users’ needs and improved access to results are all regarded as important in achieving a more sustainable European agriculture. These challenges can be addressed in a number of ways including increased collaboration, networking, transdisciplinary research and co-operation between researchers and practitioners.
This report explores the role of rural networks in enhancing innovation processes, questioning the features of the agricultural/rural networks could enhance farmers’ ability to co-innovate in cooperation with other actors. The prospect of this investigation is also to provide interesting and significant experiences that constitute examples for the ‘European Innovation Partnership’ by increasing farmers’ capacities to create, test, implement and evaluate innovations in cooperation with other rural actors.
The report synthesises the research conducted under the PRO AKIS project for the topic "Designing, implementing and maintaining agricultural/rural networks to enhance farmers’ ability to innovate in cooperation with other rural actors".
Starting with background information, the report presents a summary of the plenary presentations of the workshop, which includes a brief on the post-conflict and protracted crisis environment in the 15 participating countries (Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Ethiopia, Uganda, Central African Republic, Chad, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan). Some countries like Afghanistan qualified all in one as conflict, post-conflict and protracted crisis country.
The profound changes in European policy for farms advisory services (FAS) require a period of experimentation and results observation before the new CAP 2021-2027. This paper focuses on Measure 2 of Rural Development Programme (RDP) 2014-2020. The paper is focused on the description of case studies in three Italian regions: Campania, Emilia-Romagna and Veneto. Different Measure 2 – sub-measure 2.1 models are analyzed through a qualitative approach, using a conceptual framework adapted by Birner et al. (2009).
Based on eleven case studies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this report describes farmer-led research findings and their dissemination, and analyzes available evidence on the impact of farmer-led approaches to agricultural research and development on rural livelihoods, local capacity to innovate and adapt, and influence on governmental institutions of agricultural research and development.